Essay | Link me up for $$$: The ethics behind online advertising
By Isabel Eva Bohrer
There has always been a fine line in being ethical when advertising. In the quest to sell and beat the competition, it is easy for advertisers to pass from telling the truth to making exaggerated, or even entirely false claims. Further unethical behaviors, such as bait-and-switch offers, have existed since the advent of advertising. Even in the traditional (by that I mean “paper”) media, the difference between advertising and actual, non-endorsed content has become obscured.
Jessica Gottlieb describes herself as “an empowered consumer and a mom blogger in Los Angeles.” She recalls that “when the LA Times sold its front cover to NBC with an ad that was easy to mistake for news, [she and her husband] started thinking about cancelling [their] subscription.” To demonstrate her discontent, she even made a video that documented the scandal for the world to see.
Essay | Corrections and Online News
By John D. Thomas
I recently was on the receiving end of a rather humorous correction to one of my articles when it appeared online. An Op/Ed feature I wrote for the Chicago Tribune went through copy edit, and the word “their” was changed to “tits” when they actually meant to change it to “its.” I laughed when I saw the silly mistake, sent an email to my editor about it and the change was quickly made. No muss, no fuss.
Changes and corrections in the world of journalism are not always so funny, though. Newspapers don’t like to make them, but most do so diligently. Print and digital are very different in this regard, though. If a change is made to an article that originally appears online and did not come from the print edition, if that change is not called out prominently then the reader assumes the mistake or error never occurred in the first place.
That dynamic got me thinking about how journalism corrections are handled in the digital age, and so I investigated how some major news sites handle the process.
Essay | Blogging, Quotes, and Sources
By: Karen Dybis
If there is one thing that should matter to reporters – online or elsewhere – it is the sacredness of the quote.
The quotation marks and what falls between them are the blood and guts of any article. They set the tone of the story and give life to what could otherwise be a plain statement of facts. A good quote means you found the right source, you know how to ask the right questions and you are a competent note-taker. And it’s no exaggeration to say where quotes are placed and how they move the narrative along can be the difference between the Pulitzer Prize and what lines the bottom of a bird cage.
Essay | Twitter, Twossip, and the Library of Congress
By Isabel Eva Bohrer
“Have you ever sent out a ‘tweet’ on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress,” reported the official blog of the Library of Congress back in April 2010. Each and every public tweet since Twitter’s inception in March 2006 has been digitally archived in the Library of Congress. “That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions,” said Matt Raymond of the Library of Congress blog.
Essay | ‘Twitter terrorists’ and legislating misinformation on social networks
By: Kalyn Belsha
It started as an apparent attempt to help.
On Aug. 25, just before noon, a message went out on Twitter that five children had been kidnapped from an elementary school by an armed group in Boca del Rio, a municipality not far from Veracruz, a port city along Mexico’s eastern coast that has seen an increase in drug-related violence over the last year.
The information was retweeted and posted on other social networking sites. Panicked parents who heard the news rushed to the school to pick up their children.
But the attack on the school was never confirmed. The Twitter user who sent the message, a math teacher named Gilberto Martinez Vera, and a local journalist named Maria de Jesus Bravo, who reportedly made similar statements on her Facebook account, were arrested that same day. Their charges? Terrorism and sabotage, which in Mexico carries a prison sentence of up to 30 years.
@digethics
- With Super Bowl commercials on the mind, let's not forget about the ethics behind online ads http://t.co/CN6bCMLG
- If a correction is made to a digital article and nobody hears about it - did it happen? John D. Thomas examines: http://t.co/GYZG7B8L
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